Friday, 3 January 2014

Pair o' Possums

It's hot. It's dry. And no matter how many times I refresh the Bureau of Meteorology Cairns weather radar page, there are still no rain-filled clouds in the immediate vicinity.

I'm amazed that the possums can sleep cwched together in the macadamia tree, but they do. They manage to keep going even when the Lewin's honeyeaters and the white-browed scrubwrens yell at them. They stir slightly when I take a photograph, but that's it.

At night, they're refreshed enough to run full pelt across the roof. It might be because the corrugated iron is hot on their feet, but I suspect it's sheer devilment. One possum galloping on a metal roof sounds like a horse. Two of them sounds like the Melbourne Cup.

This possum has two tails

This possum has no tail

Apologies for the graininess of the photos. I didn't want to use flash and it's quite dark under the canopy of the macadamia tree.

Snail's writings have for years reminded me of Mayer Mercer's "What Do You Do with a Kangaroo?"

It was one of my favourite books for reading aloud to children in my class.

After one memorable discussion in which a child wondered aloud where the girl of the story lived, we changed the Opossum to a Possum to match the title's Kangaroo.

Later though, the discussion moved on to "It's either Australia, America _or she lives in a zoo_" and so after much discussion we chose to decide at each reading, where it was located and switched between Opossum and Possum.

That worked for a while, until another realised that there were other problematic animals.

Thereafter she lived at a zoo.

If I were still teaching, this blog would be a regular link in the parent newsletter for the sheer pleasure of sharing it.:)jj

There's another lighter-weight possum book than Possum Magic, called "There's a Possum in the House!".Huge potential, but I wouldn't use in in my classes because the mother of the story just screams or screeches her way through all the possum's adventures; quite the opposite of the resourceful girl in "What do you do with a Kangaroo?"jj